I
I was recently on a 16-hour flight from Chicago to Abu Dhabi. Despite the miracle of warm food 30,000 feet in the air and tiny TVs filled with popular culture, flying is a nerve-racking experience at best. The unease of sitting in an enclosed space, without the internet to save you from yourself, is at odds with everything we know about modern life. Before the flight, I was more panicked than usual, perhaps because of recent unfortunate events in the aviation industry. On June 12, 2025, 5 days before my flight, an Air India plane from Ahmedabad to London crashed into a hostel, 30 seconds after take off. There were no survivors from the plane, except one British-Indian national whose life changed forever that day. Still traumatised from the experience and fielding questions from the relentless media, he said, “Thirty seconds after take-off, there was a loud noise and then the plane crashed. It all happened so quickly.”1
The acceptable decibel level of sound for human ears for long-term listening (8 hours and above) is about 70 dB. The sound level in an aircraft can go up to 105 dB during landing and takeoff, and stay at an average of 85 dB2 during the flight. The aircraft is filled with the sonics of vibration, hum and mechanical force. Strangely, few amongst us find this intensity unsettling. Instead, the ‘white noise’ of the engines lulls most passengers into a sense of safety. What might otherwise be deafening becomes, over the course of a flight, a blanket of ‘white noise’ that masks sudden shifts folding us into a state of uneasy calm.
In recent years, there’s been a prevalence of ‘colourful’ noise – white, pink, brown and so on. Countless streaming playlists and meditation apps often promote these sounds as tools for relaxation, offering endless recordings of subtly varying white noise. Technically, white noise contains, in equal parts, all of the audible frequencies distributed across the spectrum. Akin to the effect of balanced symmetry that so pleases the human eye, white noise masks the inconsistencies of a sonic environment. It softens startling noises from the external environment and quietens intrusive thoughts from the internal environment, making the listening experience feel steady and contained.
During the flight, I noticed a similar effect. There came a moment when I put in my AirPods to enjoy light music. I also had access to foam earplugs that would have completely blocked out noise. I decided to go with the AirPods so that I could continue to hear the background hum of the engine – a reliable signal that all is okay.
II
Sound is the vibration that moves through a medium—gas, liquid, or solid—so long as it is not a vacuum. As the medium oscillates, the vibration propagates as a wave. Applying the age-old formula distance = speed x time, how far a sound wave travels is a function of the speed of sound in the medium (3.43 km/s in air, slower in denser mediums) times the duration since the impact that generated the sound. In simple words, how far one hears a sound depends on how much of which medium is between them and the source of the sound wave.
In my current house, a decades-old DDA housing block built to optimise space for low-income groups, nights are not quiet. Houses stand close together with shared walls, which amplifies the sound of movement in the otherwise quiet hours. There is frequent honking on the nearby main road, an unstoppable sound in Delhi. Dogs bark in the nearby fields, and from time to time, a wedding or festival is celebrated there, bringing with it a socially accepted excuse for loud music late into the night.
A few nights after coming back to Delhi, still wrestling with jet lag, I was about to fall asleep when suddenly, I heard what sounded like someone banging a wall with a hammer. Unused to the sounds of my own house, my brain felt that the house was being broken into. After that, no matter how much I tried to relax my brain, sleep evaded me for the rest of the night.
For humans to identify a wave as sound, one has to receive it and perceive it as such. This involves two processes – hearing and listening. Even though the words are used interchangeably, both refer to different things. To hear means to perceive as sound the vibrations or waveforms that are within the range of human hearing (in frequency typically 16hz to 20,000 Hz and amplitude 0.05dB to 130dB) and to transmit them to the auditory cortex through the ear. Listening, however, is neither limited to the ear nor to a frequency range. It is the process by which the brain ascertains the meaning and responds to what is perceived as sound. On listening, the brain labels a bird call as such, and responds to it by relaxing the body or putting it on alert, depending on which bird and what one’s relationship to it is.
“To hear is the physical means that enables perception. To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically.”3
Hearing and listening occur simultaneously, activating survival responses while also generating ideas that shape thought and consciousness. The brain builds associations by linking a sound to the context in which it is perceived. The other night, when my half-conscious mind registered the sound of banging, it immediately triggered a primal survival response. Yet over the following nights, as the banging recurred, my auditory cortex began to recognise that it was the sound of my neighbours cooking, which posed no real threat, allowing the body to relax enough to get to sleep.
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III.
A pioneer in the practice of listening was composer, educator and superstar, Pauline Oliveros. Born in the 30s in Texas and moving across parts of the US throughout her life, she was inspired by shaping the sounds inside her to take outer form. She decided in high school to become a composer and composed her first piece at 19. At the age of 21, her mother gifted her a tape recorder on which Pauline recorded the outside environment. Listening back to the tape, she was amazed at the sounds that had escaped her awareness, and which were now on the tape. It was then that she decided to “listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you’re not listening”.
Her work as a performer-composer4 and Sonic Meditations5, sowed the seed for Deep Listening6, an embodied practice that works at the intersection of improvisation, performance and meditation.
Pauline described Deep Listening7 as the practice of ‘listening to everything all the time’ (global attention) while simultaneously focusing on specific sounds (focal attention) in the entire space/time continuum of sound”.8 She conducted workshops, group meditations9 and performances, to facilitate an expansion of listening by bringing to the relationship between sounds and the inner response they evoke.
It was at an experimental residency, Free.Wav, set in the remote jungle of Attapady in Kerala, where I was first introduced to Deep Listening as an artistic practice. In one of the exercises led by Sanaya Ardeshir, popularly known as Sandunes, we went on a silent walk at dawn armed with field recorders. Pauline Oliveros described field recording as a “great way”10 to bring attention to sounds that generally escape one’s awareness. According to her, microphones and recorders extend the body’s ear, tuning us to vibrations and events that might otherwise escape awareness.
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This is a recording of the dawn chorus made by Surbhi at Bhoomi Farms, during Free.Wav in 2023. Listen to it as you’re called to – while reading, before, after, some other day or never.
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While listening to the dawn chorus on the walk, and in many subsequent explorations, I found myself engaging more deeply with what Oliveros refers to as an expansion of listening to encompass the entire space/time continuum, while maintaining focused awareness on a single sonic element. This paradox of simultaneous breadth and depth shifted my perception of sound from external and environmental, to intimate and psychic. The act of listening became a way of reconfiguring interiority – of opening a space within, shaped not by ego but by resonance.
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IV.
I have come to think of listening less as a single act and more as a shifting relationship. Some sounds feel safe, even protective; others arrive freighted with threat; some linger ambiguously between the two. Intricately woven with changing sounds is my ability to meet them – familiarity dulls fear, memory sharpens it, the body decides whether to lean in or withdraw.
At the core of Deep Listening, lies the relationship between awareness and attention. In an elegant diagram that first appears in her introduction to Sonic Meditations, Pauline Oliveros defined the relationship between attention and awareness as a dot in the middle of a circle. By bringing attention to the sounds in the space/time continuum and directing our awareness and attention, she laid the groundwork for how listening can be a channel for intentional action. In Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice, she says, “Listening is directing attention to what is heard, gathering meaning, interpreting and deciding on action.”
Deep Listening, then, as Pauline describes it, is not an unbroken openness to everything that reaches the ear. Over time, I’ve realised that listening is not just about what is out there in the world, but about the contours of the space it creates within. By holding an awareness of the whole field of sound while choosing where and how to rest one’s attention, listening becomes a form of mapping: tracing the edges between comfort and unease, noticing where the ear softens, where the body tenses, where a sound once threatening begins to lose its sting, or a once-neutral noise acquires new weight.
By noticing how sounds shape inner states, I begin to understand the conditions under which my body chooses to act or to withhold action. This awareness transforms listening into a tool for agency. Instead of reacting unconsciously to noise or retreating from disturbance, I can decide how to respond: to lean in, to disengage, to transform the energy of a sound into movement, speech, or silence.
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V.
Pauline was deeply concerned by questions of sonic influences on inner life, particularly consciousness and intentionality. In her lectures, texts and journals, made available through her archives11, she has interrogated listening as a shifting of perceptions that opens new fields of thought to be taken up creatively in art and life. Deep Listening allows for radical attunement not only to what is present but also to what is suppressed, silenced, or emergent and cultivates a space that can hold all. This can, as Pauline proposes, reshape our inner lives and, as a consequence, the social and technological architectures around us.
Image: आज़ाद पंछी/ free bird, a multichannel light and sound installation, Serendipity Arts Festival 2023
A sustained practice of Deep Listening has led to mapping interiorities that have revealed and articulated questions of co-existence with other-than-human stories, particularly those of birds and humans. Excursions to make recordings in the field, informed by a practice of Deep Listening, have shaped a fractalian map of intricately woven relationships from which speculation, graphic scores, public interventions, and sound collages have emerged.12
Perhaps this is what keeps me returning to listening as a practice: not the promise of serenity, nor the fantasy of shutting out what disturbs me, but the slow work of staying present to sound in all its unpredictability and the intention it seeds. In this attentive, sometimes uneasy space, listening moves from an unconscious reflex to a way of inhabiting the world that recognises both the hum that steadies and the chant that alarms, the bird call that opens a morning and the hammer blow that fractures a night, each leaving its own resonance behind.
About the Author
pale blue dotter / Surbhi Mittal is an artist and musician who works with the fragile and fertile thresholds between bodies and machines, humans and more-than-humans, noise and silence. She seeks emergence in response to the planetary moment marked by ecological unravelling, technological acceleration, and urgent reimagining. Major works include The Last Aviary There Ever Was (2022–), The City at Dawn (2023), dawn drones (2023–), Angdaai(2024), Seconds Before Coming (2024-), Deviant Octopus (2024-) and Unbound (2024). Her live performances have been featured at Magnetic Fields (2022), Serendipity Arts Festival (2023), Reproduce Listening Rooms, ONNO Sonic Distortions, and Delhi Improvisers Orchestra. She is a founding member of Synth Hang, a collective of experimental musicians based in Delhi.
Learn more about her work here.
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/air-india-dreamliner-crash-heard-loud-noise-30-seconds-into-flight-says-survivor-vishwash-kumar-ramesh-8653258’ ↩︎
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140226-tricks-for-a-peaceful-flight#
↩︎Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice by Pauline Oliveros ↩︎
Pauline and her contemporaries challenged the separation between a performer and composer by practising as Performer-Composers, artists who wrote as well as performed the music. ↩︎
When Pauline was in her mid-thirties, she moved to San Diego for a University job. It was the late 60s and she was confronted with a state of despair – Kennedy assassinated, Vietnam War, University rebellion. This led to Pauline retreating from concerts and turning towards practising drones on her accordion as a respite from the noise of the world outside. In 1971, she published ‘Sonic Meditation’, “a body of work that could be done by persons without musical training. Sonic Meditations are based on patterns of attention. In other words these pieces are ways of listening and responding.” ↩︎
Pauline, along with fellow composers Stuart Dempster and Pannaoitis, descended into a tunnel to improvise with each other and the reverb in the tunnel. The resulting album came to be known as ‘Deep Listening’ and was the starting point for her writings on Deep Listening as a practice. ↩︎
“Deep coupled with Listening or Deep Listening for me is learning to expand the perception of sounds to include the whole space/time continuum of sound— encountering the vastness and complexities as much as possible. Simultaneously one ought to be able to target a sound or sequence of sounds as a focus within the space/time continuum and to perceive the detail or trajectory of the sound or sequence of sounds. Such focus should always return to, or be within the whole of the space/time continuum (context).
Such expansion means that one is connected to the whole of the environment and beyond.”
– Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice by Pauline Oliveros ↩︎Described as all sounds that can be heard and not heard, so practically all sounds that have ever existed and will exist. Acoustic space is where time and space merge as they are articulated by sound. ↩︎
Buoyed by a surge in ‘wellness programs’ in the post-war United States, she was often asked if there was a difference between Deep Listening and Meditation. She maintained that Deep Listening was a form of meditation that expands the consciousness of sound to all possible dimensions of awareness that are possible for a human, both internally and externally. ↩︎
Field recording is the practice of capturing sound outside the controlled environment of a studio, usually with portable microphones and recording equipment. It is also an artistic and research method. It allows the recordist to engage with environments through attentive listening, often highlighting sonic details that are overlooked in daily life. In sound art, music, and acoustic ecology, field recordings are used not only as raw material for composition but also as a way to explore relationships between humans, other-than-humans, and environments. ↩︎
Pauline Oliveros Papers, 1931-1981
https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:%2F13030%2Fc86w9d7v ↩︎Inspired by Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown ↩︎